The microbiome influences the patient response to cancer immunotherapy

27/12/2017

Recent works demosntate a relationship between the microbiome and the response to immunotherapy in cancer patients. It has been published that highly diverse gut microbiomes are related with a better response to the immunotherapy.

In some works the tumour growth was reduced in mice that received faecal transplants from people who responded to immunotherapy:

The type of most abundant bacteria in the gut microbiome was also important:

The type of microbe was also linked to differences in responses to treatment, the researchers discovered. For example, people whose guts contained a lot of bacteria from a group called Clostridiales were more likely to respond to treatment, whereas those who had more Bacteroidales bacteria were less likely to respond.